General gaming discussion

Exclamation Marc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121332762#Comment_121332762

I'm not sure how anyone could consider any or all of Astro's Playroom, Returnal, Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart, Spider-Man 2 or God of War Ragnarok (albeit that was on ps4 too) "formulaic and bland".

I agree that the PSVR and PSVR2 have to date been woefully undersupported however it is a niche product. I have a PSVR and its great fun but the range of games, particularly must have VR games is not great.

recyclops

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121332873#Comment_121332873

Astros was a magnificent demo for the console ( annoying the best use of the console was the first 3 hours or so I had it) Ragnarok was very similar to God of war from 2018, Horizon forbidden west was the same as Horizon Zero Dawn, while I havent played Spidey 2 I cant say it will be much different from spiderman or Miles Morales.

That's what I mean when I say bland and formulaic they just don't feel massively like an upgrade, I just feel they had big hitters like you said Returnal and Ratchet and that was all early but then its kind of stagnated. I was hoping SH2 would be the heavy hitter as a console exclusive and would bring me back to the PS2 masterpiece we had

Retr0gamer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121332873#Comment_121332873

I kind of find most of the PlayStation exclusives have that boring Ubisoft formula. Every Sony exclusive seems to be coming to PC as well, demons souls and astro being the only two that haven't made it to PC or no plans to come to PC although Demons souls is a remake of an older game.

It's probably more that the PlayStation really hasn't had any appeal to me in a long time. Really miss Japan studios. You could blame it on rising development costs but Nintendo have been delivering consistently original and varied games for the switch. I feel Sony is investing in bigger budget but very safe games. I thought 2018 God of War would have been signalled a change in development at Sony, giving studios more autonomy but it hasn't happened.

Retr0gamer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121332911#Comment_121332911

I kind of had a feeling that silent hill 2 remake would be a disaster with Bloober team involved. Giving a game which deals with mental health and anguish to a team that consistently had the most boneheaded and quite frankly dangerous takes on mental health was the first warning.

johnny_ultimate

I have plenty of issues with Sony’s current creative output (especially the lack of variety compared to past gens), but yeah it’s unfair to blame them for this one when they don’t have any hand in development. Konami is a disaster at the moment between the half-assed MGS release and the farcical Silent Hill Ascension, and Bloober Team have shown they likely don’t have the juice or creative substance to tackle one of the greatest games of all time. So if it does indeed turn out to be a misjudged effort, it’s on them. There’s been warning signs around that remake ever since it was announced. Ditto MGS3 remake, tbh - that footage released the other week just looked like a UE5 tech demo.

Retr0gamer

We still have Silent Hill f at least. That one has Ryukishi07 as the writer and he's made some incredible horror VN games. That at least has a chance of being good.

CatInABox

MS continues their head long rush into all things AI, announcing a partnership with inworld to help create AI NPC tools for developers.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/6/23948454/microsoft-xbox-generative-ai-developer-tools-inworld-partnership

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=63&v=jHodl-n7vvU&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2F&source_ve_path=MjM4NTE&feature=emb_title

In my opinion, it's all really bleak.

PixelPlayer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121333070#Comment_121333070

I'm scratching my head a bit after watching that. Is that supposed to be a marketing video lauding the benefits of AI NPC's? Because that's pretty depressing stuff.

johnny_ultimate

Just remember: whenever you see a company investing in AI, they’re simply thinking about how they can make a lot of jobs redundant and make more money for their rich shareholders.

Grumpypants

I've been dipping more and more into Netflix gaming as they have been putting more of an effort in these last few months to add stuff that's not mobile gaming.

Some great games like Spiritfarer, turtles shredders revenge, into the breach (my fav), Kentucky route zero, oxenfree 1&2 and Valiant hearts coming home.

They Just added Dead Cells netflix edition too. And coming later today at some point is Football Manager 2024 mobile.

If you have netflix it's free in the mobile app.

TitianGerm

I think my next game is Mario RPG.

The PS5 is just sitting there gathering dust at this stage. Demon Souls, Ratchet an Clank and Returnal were the only PS5 games worth playing for me, everything else just seems to be open world collect-a-thons which I'm sick of.

Penn

I think I'm going to give Bloodborne another try over the Xmas. This time I'll ban myself from using the Hunters Axe altogether, as that's what ended up ruining my enjoyment last time as the spin move was all I did for the entire game.

TitianGerm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121334503#Comment_121334503

Use the saw cleaver at the start.

I might do another play through myself but be a fancy pants dude with a walking cane 😁

johnny_ultimate

Decided to jump straight into the 40 FPS mode in Spider-Man 2 without trying the full performance mode, as I really wanted to see what it was like without being biased by a higher frame rate. I'd tried it in Ratchet & Clank before, but I jumped back there from 60 and felt the difference for sure just because there was naturally a dip in smoothness. But Digital Foundry's constant praise of 40 FPS made me want to give it a proper go.

Having played 2-3 hours now, it's actually really impressive. It's night & day compared to 30 FPS, despite the seemingly modest jump. It's just smoother and more responsive, much more so than a 10 FPS boost would suggest. Obviously, it needs a decent TV / monitor and VRR support, but it's a great use of tech to balance out image quality and performance. It's clearly not as smooth as full-fat 60+ FPS, and I'll probably jump up to that now having given 40 FPS a fair shot. But it's definitely something more developers should be embracing IMO if they don't have the headroom to get to 60 FPS. It just needs to be as buttery smooth as Insomniac's implementation.

Semi-related: as great as SM2 performs, it's also been jarring jumping to it from Alan Wake 2. The latter is the first game in a while that is such a generational graphics leap that it can't help but leave even an exceptionally well-crafted and technically ambitious game like SM2 in the dust from a visual perspective. SM2 is a great case study in maximising console performance for gameplay purposes, but AW2 is a pretty peerless triumph of visual fidelity.

Markitron

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121335433#Comment_121335433

40 FPS modes are such a good addition to games, I am not sure why it is pretty much only Sony that is bothering with them. I think the only non-Sony game I have played at 40 FPS is A Plague Tale.

Cordell

Actually 10 fps coming from 30 to 40 is a 33% improvement, that's not a modest jump. To put it in context, a GPU that is 33% better might cost you 500 more.

Retr0gamer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121336036#Comment_121336036

Yep even on a properly optimised game the difference between PAL50 and NTSC was night and day and that was only a 17% increase.

Markitron

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121336036#Comment_121336036

The way I look at it is that its exactly halfway between 30 and 60 fps in terms of smoothness but at the cost of only an extra 10 fps.

Fucking bargain.

johnny_ultimate

Modest in the sense that it’s a much smaller jump than the far more typical 30 to 60 divide. But yes, the leap in responsiveness and fluidity is very significant, so not modest in that sense - and, as Richard Leadbetter always points out, the maths show the responsiveness is actually halfway between 30 and 60 despite it being closer to the former than the latter in raw frames.

pixelburp

This is why I prefer cinema to gaming: nobody bores the árse off me debating framerates; and when it does come up it's cos some idiot made a 48fps movie and surprise surprise, it looked like shíte. 😜

Cordell

They do feel like a cheap TV show, but that might just be what were we conditioned to see.

PixelPlayer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121336305#Comment_121336305

Yeah the soap opera effect. Also when you're on 4k you can see all the flaws in the set and cgi really sticks out.

I cancelled 4k sub on netflix and went down to HD and it looks much better.

But for video games, realism is better. I turned off film grain on AW2. I mean I've got this powerful PC coupled with a game that pushes it so hard I can only hit medium settings, I'm not going to stick a fuzzy, dotty layer on top of it. It's party because it's not actually real film grain I suppose.

johnny_ultimate

I thought the Hobbit films in high frame rate were, in the words of the great Hayao Miyazaki, ‘an insult to life itself’. However, the HFR presentation of Avatar: Way of Water - particularly the underwater scenes and action sequences - was truly spectacular to behold in the cinema. I’m someone who is extremely sensitive to any kind of high frame rate live action footage (soap opera effect on TVs makes me physically recoil in disgust) but Cameron did a damn good job with Avatar 2. Probably doesn’t hurt that virtually the whole thing is computer generated at times.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121336477#Comment_121336477

I think the big difference in this two examples was how Avatar 2 structured those scenes as something more like a nature documentary than fictional Sci-Fi drama; the film kinda paused to become something more suited to a high framrate than Hobbit's obvious fictional facade and like you had a better time buying into the higher rates.

Markitron

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121336427#Comment_121336427

I **** hate film grain in games, why the **** would you want to replicate a flaw from another format entirely? It is just as stupid as the lens flare that every game seemed to have about 20 years ago. Then again I hate film grain in movies too.

Kingp35

I started playing The Last Guardian this week. I'm about 3 hours into it and my god the camera and controls are abysmal! Clearly there's a good game in there but the frustration with the camera and trying to get the Guardian to do what I want them to do is ruining the game for me!

Retr0gamer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121336305#Comment_121336305

The only thing that annoys me about the framerate debate is that people arguing that lower framerates are no different to 60 fps or some other nonsense when quite clearly for games the higher the framerate the better a game plays. It's usually console fanboys saying they can't tell the difference which I call bullshit on. Even worse is when game developers say they choose 30 fps because it's more 'cinematic'. It's really condescending. Ninja theory in particular with DMC. It was quickly clearly affected by being 30 fps but then after talking so much about how cinematic it is they release a special edition at 60 fps.

Basically people that claim they can't feel the difference between 30 and 60 fps are the videogame equivalent of flat earthers because just like the curvature of the earth it's a scientifically proven fact and not up for debate.

Retr0gamer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121336477#Comment_121336477

I kind of like how Cameron changed the framerate depending on the scene instead of sticking to HFR throughout. It meant I barely noticed it and it avoided the soap opera look. It's kind of the same way animators will vary framerate based on the shot.

One thing that really annoys me in games, and it's mostly on the switch and PS4, it's half rate animations in the distance. It's not fooling anyone and looks really obvious.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121336570#Comment_121336570

I'm playing fatal frame 2 and it looks fantastic in that game, although I feel it's less film grain and more emulating the grain effect you get naturally from your eyes at low light levels. Silent hill 2 did similar.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121336920#Comment_121336920

Might be best to try the disc version unlatched on a PS5 as it apparently runs 60 fps. I couldn't stick with the game on PS4 as the character controlled like ass and was exasperated by a framerate that rarely hit 30 FPS.

Penn

I don't think 30fps is that big of a problem, so long as it's a consistent 30fps. I never used to particularly care whether it was 30 or 60, probably because most games were 30 so I never really noticed. But yeah, from about halfway through the PS4 gen when a lot more games were a solid 60fps, going back to 30fps can be jarring. Any game since which has performance or resolution modes, I'd always pick performance.

But again, I think for both, a consistent framerate is the most important thing, because I'd rather play a solid 30fps than a janky 60fps which drops between 45 to 60. Star Wars Jedi Survivor kept throwing me off because it purposefully went from 60fps gameplay to 24fps during cutscenes which was just so off-putting.

SuperBowserWorld

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121334138#Comment_121334138

Yup, burned out hard on open world games.

I have AC Valhalla + the DLC (got it cheap). So I might play the Ireland DLC, which I believe is like a much smaller snapshot of the main game, and it looks gorgeous and it's the only A, AA or AAA game set in Ireland 😁.

And I've TOTK main game to finish. And then soak up the rest of it over time.

Then maybe Elden Ring. Some time.

And a ton of other open world stuff that I don't have the time or energy to go near.

Super Mario Wonder, started it played it, enjoyed it, finished it. Simple, fun, zero commitment. 😁